Tucson Homes – Company Relocation
October 25, 2007
Post Tags: company-relocation , Tucson Real Estate Market , Tucson-AZ-Real-Estate , Tucson-Home-Values
Company Relocation Departments
Homes are often bought by companies when they relocate their employees. The listing is called “A Relocation” there are quite a few of these on the Tucson Market right now. In some cases they paid more than the market price for these properties and are now trying to sell them for what they paid plus costs.
Working with a relocation company is often quite frustrating for buyers. There is a lot more paperwork involved and more restriction placed on the process. Unlike a transaction where you have a buyer and seller negotiating a contact 7 days a week. Relocation companies only work 5 days a week. If you make an offer on a Friday afternoon you can forget getting a response to your offer before sometime Monday or later.
Relocation Departments are not set up to loose money for the company but they are not very good at marketing the homes they have purchased. They don’t like carrying these properties on the books but are often reluctant to do anything to get them off the books. There is no staging, there is often deferred maintenance and in many cases these properties were left in poor repair and dirty. No one in the relocation process seems to be in charge of getting a home ready and presentable before putting it on the market.
Relocation companies are just like many home owners that remember the boom days where you put a sign in the yard and in three hours you had it under contract and you could pull the sign and give it to your neighbor so they could sell their home.
That Tucson Real Estate Market is gone. Relocation companies should get the message sooner would be better than later. If they would:
- Clean the property
- Repair deferred maintenance
- Stage the property
- Maintain the landscaping
- Assign someone with authority to negotiate contracts 24/7
- Streamline the paperwork
Then they would see a quicker turn around on these properties and not have to carry them on the books as long as they do.
Prolonging a property on the market that is vacant and in disrepair only leads to further deterioration of the property creating a cycle of declining value.
Tucson Homes – Why are Prices Staying High
The Real Estate Market in Tucson and in the Country is in a time like never before. Even the Great Depression wasn’t like this. There were no zero down, roll in the closing costs, loans then. There were no home equity loans where you could use your home as an ATM machine. This means the historical patterns no longer apply to what we are seeing today.
Historically when inventories of homes increased the prices of those homes decreased. But this week we have looked at three reasons this is not happening at this time.
- Foreclosures are up but there is no equity in this home the property is often worth less than the loan amount causing properties to be on the market for higher prices than in the past.
- Make Me Move attitude on the part of many just having their homes on the market but not for sale.
- Poor Pricing based on “What My Neighbor Got Last Year” or “I Need To Get This Much”.
- Company Relocation Dept. not adapting to the change in the market having paid more for the property than it was worth and not willing to do what it takes to market the home in today’s Tucson Real Estate Market.
The real clincher is that even with all of this going on with Asking Prices coming down but still Staying High, we are seeing Sale Prices increasing slightly when we look at the year over year statistics. September 2007 was on average $25,000 higher in sale price than September 2006.
Sales are down but prices are up. How does this work here is an simple example.
The Widget Company
- 2006 sold 4 Widgets for $5 each = $20
- 2007 sold 3 Widgets for $10 each = $30
Sales are down, but prices and profits are up.
We should not loose sight of the fact that the majority, and a high majority at that, of home mortgages are still 30 year fixed with at least 20% down. At least the Mortgage industry has begun to address the issues of “Your Home as an ATM” and “If you can Fog a Spoon You can Get a Loan“
